12 Significant Website Redesign Checklist

A website with astonishing design and satisfying web standards would definitely please people. One will do the redesign to make the website more user friendly, improve over all design and make the website with more call to action and so on. But to retain your old visitiors / customers you need to think beyond just web design standards and think in hand with search engines to keep your current ranking and visibility in search engines.

In this post I have tried to provide a comprehensive checklist that can be used when going for website redesign. I have categorized the checklist in two parts and the first part deals with “Before Launching the Website” and the last part deals with “After Launching the Website”.

Before Launching the Website

Keyword Ranking: Find your keyword ranking in major search engines. Does your keyword targeted in the old site generate quality leads to your website? You can use the same keywords / core keyword with some variations in your new site. Your noted previous keyword ranking will act as a baseline and help you to plan your link building strategy for the new site.

Most Visited / Entrance Page: Make a note of your most visited / entrance page and make navigation accordingly.

Goal Conversion Path: Find your goal conversion path and if it is effective, try to provide the same in new site also.

Redirection: Always use server side permanent 301 redirection to move your every URL from old website to new website. (Should go simultaneous with website launch)

• Make a uniform home page. (Not having separate index.asp, index.htm etc)
• Avoid canonical issues in website. Ensure that www version and non www version don’t reside in single website.
• Don’t redirect all the URLs to homepage. Instead make the corresponding pages redirect to pages with similar content / similar theme. By doing this we can make sure we pass the entire credibility and Google Page Rank of the old webpage to new webpage.

Link Validation: Check for any broken links and fix it before launching with link validators.

Custom Error Page: Potential customer may land up in an error page through external source. Provide a custom 404 error page with important navigations of a website to overcome this.

Server Down Time: Avoid server downtime.

Proper Image Optimization: Make sure your images are optimized properly. Ensure all are named properly, have alt tags and text placed near and around are most relevant to the image.

After Launching the Website

Track Inbound Links: Your old website could have gained many credible inbound links from other relevant websites. In case you have changed your URLs you need to contact the website owners and get the link pointed to your new URL.

XML Sitemap: Create and submit XML sitemap to search engines to enhance the crawl rate. If you have one already, resubmit after the site launch.(After making necessary changes if website URLs are changed)

Monitor webmaster stats: After you have launched your website keep an eye on your Google webmaster stats. Google recently started showing “File Not Found” destination in webmaster tool. If any particular error URL linked from more external sources, treat them with 301 redirection to the best possible page.

Checking along with SE: Go and find in search engines with the command site:www.domain.com whether search engines look at your site as your potential customer sees!

Probably, why not post a comment and I will add your suggestion if it is good enough to make it to the checklist.

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